Frontline Tours In The Holy Land
Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke today at the Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference held in Jerusalem today. He touched on the changing world and how Israel is leading in technology and innovation. He spoke about the changing relationships with the Arab world and the broader globe.
Watch the whole speech below:
In a perfect world, Bibi would be in deep conversations with the incoming Trump administration on how best to put the two state solution in the garbage bin. For Bibi Netanyahu the availed leader of Israel and nemesis of Obama and the EU, the status quo despite its road to nowhere is a far more digestible situation. Yet, Bibi with all of his political prowess and especially astute understanding of the USA has not fully digested the Donald Trump victory.
In steps Naftali Bennett, the Minister of Education and the widely successful entrepreneur turned right wing leader. His position as the head of Jewish Home may not be interesting to Americans, but he represents the future of Israel, which if the current trajectory holds will be led by knitted kippa wearing nationalists who are busy playing the part that the secular kibbutzniks played before the creation of the state.
Naftali Bennett and the National Religious Camp are fast becoming the predominant force in Israel and it was with this feeling of destiny that Bennett reached out to a few of Donald Trump’s associates on the need to get rid of the Two State “Solution.” After all, Trump is more than the president to be, he is a revolution and earthquake in the world order. For an Israel constrained by the bygones of Oslo and State Department Arabism as well as Neo-Conservative control, Trump represents the possibility to reach peace without jettisoning Israel’s Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria.
Most Americans assume that Israel is in love with the Oslo accords, but as most of the Israeli street knows, since the Oslo Accords 1000’s of Israelis have been killed and in the same space of time more and more communities have been built in Judea and Samaria. Young religious Zionists have grown into maturity and taken the reigns of power. With the “Palestinian” Arabs showing no signs of coming to terms with even one Jew living in the Land of Israel, alternative solutions to Oslo are a must.
This is where Bennett’s outreach to Trump lies. If Trump really is the anti-globalist President to be, then he understands the need to move on from a conflict entirely manufactured by globalist ambitions in the Levant. It is in fact the globalists embedded in Foggy Bottom and Brussels that have rewritten the Jewish people’s narrative to exclude them from meaningful attachment to their homeland. For these Arabists, Israel is Palestine and those poor Arabs that found themselves there 100 years ago have really been there the whole time. Trump understands this is make-believe and it is the Jews that have been their continuous for thousands of years. He understands that for America to be strong it must support a complete reconstituted Israel. This is in order to offset the globalist plan to detach humanity from the Almighty. To do that Soros and his ilk know they must remove the obvious miracle of the Jewish people’s return to their Land. If there are no miracles, there is no active G-d as far as they are concerned.
Trump and his advisers including Bannon know that the future lies with an Israel that is strong, independent, and in complete control of its Divinely ordained boundaries. The faster Bibi gets this, the faster Israel will find true peace.
Below is one solution offered. There are many others.
What can we expect from President-elect Donald Trump’s administration?
The positions that Trump struck during the presidential campaign were sometimes inconsistent and even contradictory. So it is impossible to forecast precisely what he will do once in office. But not everything is shrouded in mystery. Indeed, some important characteristics of his administration are already apparent.
First of all, President Barack Obama’s legacy will die the moment he leaves the White House on January 20. Republicans may not agree on much. But Trump and his party do agree that Obama’s policies must be abandoned and replaced. And they will work together to rollback all of Obama’s actions as president.
On the domestic policy front this means first and foremost that Obamacare will be repealed and replaced with health industry reforms that open the medical insurance market to competition.
With the support of the Republican-controlled Senate, Trump will end Obama’s push to reshape the US Supreme Court in the image of the activist, indeed, authoritarian Israeli Supreme Court. During his four year term, Trump may appoint as many as four out of nine justices. In so doing he will shape the court for the next generation.
Trump made clear during the race that the justices he selects will oppose the Obama-led leftist plan to transform the Court into an imperial judiciary that determines social and cultural norms and legislates from the bench.
Trump will also clean out the IRS. Under Obama, the IRS became an instrument of political warfare. Conservative and right wing pro-Israel groups were systematically discriminated against and targeted for abuse. It is possible to assume that Trump will fire the IRS officials who have been involved in this discriminatory abuse of power.
To be sure, much is still unclear about Trump’s foreign policy. But here too, certain things are already known. Trump will vacate the US’s signature from the nuclear deal with Iran.
Trump will not be able to repair the damage the deal has already caused – at least not immediately. He will not be able to reimpose the multilateral and UN Security Council sanctions on Iran that the nuclear deal cancelled. Such a move will require prolonged negotiations and their conclusion is far from assured.
Trump will likewise be unable to take back the billions of dollars that Iran has already received due to the abrogation of economic sanctions and through cash payoffs from the Obama administration.
At the same time, from his first day in office, Trump will change the trajectory of US policy towards Iran. He will oppose Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. He will oppose Iran’s rise to regional hegemony.
A second conclusion that it is already possible to draw about the Trump presidency is that Trump will be much more like the hands off Ronald Reagan than the hands on Obama. His past as a businessman along with his lack of governmental or political experience will lead Trump to set general policy guidelines and goals and delegate responsibility for crafting suitable policies and programs to his cabinet secretaries and advisors.
This means that personnel will very much be policy in the Trump administration. Whereas Obama’s cabinet members and advisors have been more or less interchangeable since Obama himself determined everything from the details of his policies to the ways that the policies would be sold to the public (or hidden from the public), and implemented, Trump’s pick of advisors will be strategically significant.
Clearly it is too early to know who Trump’s advisors and cabinet members will be. But there is good reason for Israel to be encouraged by the advisors who have worked with Trump during the campaign.
Vice President-elect Mike Pence is one of the most pro-Israel policymakers in America. Former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich is an outspoken ally of Israel and of the US-Israel alliance. Likewise, former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani, former senator Rick Santorum, retired general Mike Flynn, and former UN ambassador John Bolton are all extraordinary champions of the US alliance with Israel.
Trump’s Israel affairs advisors during the campaign, David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt are also among the strongest advocates of the US-Israel alliance that have arisen in decades.
The striking friendliness of the Trump election team is even more notable when we consider what Israel would have faced from a Hillary Clinton administration. Clinton’s cabinet-in-waiting at the George Soros-funded and John Podesta-run Center for American Progress contained no serious advocates of the US-Israel alliance.
And her stable of advisors were not merely indifferent to Israel.
The Wikileaks revelations from Podesta’s emails, like the correspondences published by Judicial Watch from Clinton’s tenure as secretary made clear that Clinton’s team included several advisors with deep-seated hostility if not animus toward Israelis and toward the Israeli government.
The third thing that is already clear about the nature of the Trump administration is that it will not hesitate to abandon received wisdom on a whole host of issues and initiate policies that the bipartisan policy elites wouldn’t be caught dead even talking about.
Trump’s victory was first and foremost a defeat for the American elite, what Prof. Angelo Codevilla memorably referred to as America’s “ruling class.”
Trump’s campaign did not merely target the Democratic establishment. He attacked the Republican establishment as well. True, in his victory speech Trump said that he intends to heal the rifts in American society – presumably starting with his own party. But at least one thing ought to be clear about that reunification. As the president-elect, Trump will set the terms of the healing process.
There is every reason to expect that at a minimum, Trump will not soon forgive the Republicans who refused to support and even opposed his presidential bid. Members of the NeverTrump camp will be denied positions and influence over the Trump administration and sent into the political desert.
Another establishment that fell on its sword in this election is the American Jewish establishment. Led by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish establishment, including its largest donors, stood almost as one in its support for Clinton. The American Jewish leadership placed their partisan preferences above their communal interests and responsibilities. In so doing they enfeebled the community in a manner that will be difficult to repair.
Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have anti-Semites in their ranks. The Jewish establishment ignored and pretended away the Democratic anti-Semites, even when they were burning Israeli flags at the Democratic convention. They said nothing when anti-Israel ravings that were at best borderline anti-Semitic of senior Clinton advisors like Thomas Pickering and Anne Marie Slaughter were published by Judicial Watch.
On the other hand, the Jewish establishment castigated Trump as anti-Semitic for the presence of anti-Semites like David Duke on the fringes of the Republican Party. Legitimate criticisms of anti-Israel financier George Soros were condemned as anti-Semitic while truly anti-Semitic assaults on Trump donor Sheldon Adelson by Clinton backers went unaddressed.
The consequence of the Jewish establishment’s almost total mobilization for Clinton is clear. The Trump White House won’t have an open door policy for those who falsely accused Trump of anti-Semitism.
Jewish Americans are going to have to either oust the leaders of the groups that put their party before their community or establish new organizations to defend their interests. Whatever path is chosen, the process of rebuilding the communal infrastructure the community’s leaders have wrecked will be long, difficult and expensive.
Unlike the American Jewish community, for Israel, the defeat of the American establishment is a positive development. The American foreign policy elite’s default bipartisan position on Israel was bad for both Israel and the health and reliability of its alliance with the US.
As I explained in my book, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, there was a dismaying consistency in US policy towards Israel that ran from Bill Clinton’s administration through the George W. Bush administration and on to the Obama administration.
At least since the Clinton years, the received wisdom of the American foreign policy elite has been that the US must seek to swiftly cause Israel to sign a deal with the PLO. The contours of the deal are similarly clear to all concerned. Israel must surrender control over all or most of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and transfer the areas, more or less Jew free, to the PLO.
This bipartisan view is inherently hostile to Israel. It places all the responsibility for making peace on Israel. And as the sole responsible party, Israel is also the sole party that is guilty for the absence of peace. The flipside is similarly dismal. Palestinians are absolved of responsibility for terrorism, hatred and political warfare against Israel.
The anti-Israel hostility inherent in the two-state paradigm has brought on a situation where even pro-Israel US officials end up joining their anti-Israel colleagues in bearing down on Israel to act in manners that are inimical both to its national security and to the very concept of a US-Israel alliance. The foreign policy ruling class’s commitment to the two-state paradigm has blinded them to Israel’s strategic importance to the US and caused them to see the US’s only stable ally in the region as a drag on US interests.
Many of Trump’s advisors, including Gingrich, whose name has been raised as a leading candidate either to serve as Trump’s White House chief of staff or as Secretary of State, have rejected this received wisdom. In a Republican presidential debate in 2011, Gingrich referred to the Palestinians as an “invented people,” and noted that they indoctrinate their children to perceive Jews as subhuman and seek their annihilation. For his statement of fact, Gingrich was brutally assaulted by Democratic and Republican elites.
But he never rescinded his statement.
Trump’s election provides Israel with the first opportunity in fifty years to reshape its alliance with the US.
This new alliance must be based a common understanding and respect for what Israel has to offer the US as well as the limits of what the US can offer Israel. The limits of US assistance are in large part the consequences of the many genies that Obama unleashed during the past eight years. And the opportunities will come more in areas related to Israel’s relations with the Palestinians and the political war being waged against it by the Europeans and the international left than to the challenges posed by the ascendance of Islamism in the Middle East.
To be sure, Trump is inconsistent. But from what we do know we must recognize that his rise is a deflection point in US history.
It is a rare moment where things that were unimaginable a month ago are possible. And if we play our cards right, like the American people, Israel stands to gain in ways we never dreamed.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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As Daniel Greenfield so eloquently stated: This wasn’t an election. It was a revolution. But what kind of revolution was it? The Trump revolt like Brexit as well as Bibi’s reelection in 2015 were uprisings focused on tearing down the post Cold War system that has become known as globalism.
Like most leftists, Obama’s policies focused on creating a utopian reality without laying out any exact path to get there. The Obama approach of demeaning national identity, sovereignty, and authority while boosting up elements associated with bad actors is an approach that strives to create as its end result a citizen of the world.
Here in Israel, Jewish pioneers have been berated by the international media, EU bureaucrats, and most importantly Obama himself. For the leftist academics and policy experts, Jewish pioneers are seen as an impediment to “a much needed Palestinian State.” The globalists view the pioneers of Judea and Samaria much the same way they view blue-collar workers in the flyover country in America or those factory workers in Britain: stubborn racist simpletons willing to hold back progress for some archaic principles.
But this is not the case. Globalists view the world as one giant utilitarian experiment where the ends justify the means. Yet, despite their drive for control and manipulation, yesterday their dreams crashed and burned on the altar of reality.
Real America are those places that nurture the belief that America like Israel needs to stand for something far more essential than Hollywood, .Coms, or Jay Z. America’s exceptionalism is due to the fact that it draws from the strength of Israel’s eternal covenant. The more it seeks to uphold the divine moral code given to us from the Creator, the more it will flourish. The Americans who won the election rejected the globalist vision that all countries are equal. They rejected the idea that the Arab in Saudi Arabia and the Christian or Jew in America have the same worldview despite the fact that we are all children of the Creator. For a person who comes to America must decide to adopt biblical worldview which places the Almighty front and center one’s life decisions.
When we take away a nation’s specialness we render its citizens powerless. That was Obama’s mission from the beginning. Obama almost succeeded until a reality TV star and real estate tycoon became the most unlikely leader of a revolt whose message, “This Land is Our Land!”
In many ways the current wave anti-globalism can be said to start not with Brexit, but with the Israeli elections that saw an unlikely leader in Bibi Netanyahu get reelected against all odds. In fact, it was Obama and the international community that worked in overdrive to unseat him. It was the Israeli leftist media who picked sides and tried to break the hope of the common man, but just like on Nov. 8th, the Israelis said no. They said no to globalism and they demanded their country back.
The lessons from Bibi Netanyahu’s and Donald Trump’s victories is never to underestimate a person or nation’s desire to be true to itself and to chart its own course. Man’s soul desires the freedom to choose, to learn, and to develop. Government interference and antithetical to the process of Creation. Without globalism, true freedom based on national sovereignty and individual rights has a chance to guide the world.
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In one of the immortal lines of Godfather 2, mafia boss Michael Corleone discusses the fate of his brother, who betrayed him, with his enforcer.
“I don’t want anything to happen to him while my mother is alive,” Corleone said.
Message received.
The brother was murdered after their mother’s funeral.
Last week it was reported that the Obama administration has delivered a message to the Palestinian Authority. The administration has warned the PA that the US will veto any anti-Israel resolution brought before the UN Security Council before the US presidential elections on November 8.
Message received.
Open season on Israel at the Security Council will commence November 9. The Palestinians are planning appropriately.
Israel needs to plan, too. Israel’s most urgent diplomatic mission today is to develop and implement a strategy that will outflank President Barack Obama in his final eight weeks in power.
Lobbying the administration is pointless. Obama has waited eight years to exact his revenge on Israel for not supporting his hostile, strategically irrational policies. And he has no interest in letting bygones be bygones.
Before turning to what Israel must do, first we need to understand what Israel can do.
A good place to begin is by considering what just transpired at UNESCO, where twice in a week, UNESCO bodies resolved to erase 3,000 years of Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.
The fight that Israel waged at UNESCO is not the fight it needs to wage at the Security Council. The stakes at the Security Council are far higher.
Like the UN General Assembly, UNESCO’s decisions are non-binding declarations that have no legal or operational significance. As such, there is no reason to expend great resources to fight them. For Israel, the goal of the fight at UNESCO is not to defeat anti-Israel initiatives. That is impossible given the Palestinians’ automatic majority.
The purpose of the fight at UNESCO is to humiliate European governments that side with antisemitic initiatives, and to weaken the congenitally anti-Israel body itself.
The government achieved both of these objectives. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s disavowal of his own government’s abstention from the vote on the first resolution – like the similar position taken after the fact by the Mexican government – was a diplomatic victory for Israel.
So too, the fact that UNESCO’s own Secretary-General Irina Bukova felt compelled to disavow her own agency’s actions by rejecting the resolution’s denial of the Jewish people’s ties to Jerusalem was a significant victory for Israel. Her statement was deeply damaging for UNESCO and its reputation.
Finally, the fact that Tanzania and the Philippines voted against the resolution was a testament to Israel’s capacity to convince other governments to abandon their traditional pro-Palestinian voting pattern.
The Palestinians won the vote at UNESCO because they are more powerful diplomatically than Israel. They have an automatic anti-Israel majority. But they weren’t empowered by their victory. To the contrary. They were bloodied by it.
In a sign of their weakening hold on member nations, the Palestinians and Jordanians felt compelled to send a threatening letter to the members of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee lest they dare to vote against the resolution. Powerful players don’t make threats. They don’t need to.
Israel’s experience at UNESCO teaches us that there are governments that are open to counteroffers. Israel doesn’t need to hide in America’s shadow. It is capable of working on its own to blunt the impact of the Palestinians’ automatic majority. And it will need to use all of its resources to fend off a US-backed assault at the Security Council.
Unlike UNESCO, the Security Council can pass legally binding resolutions. Israel needs to be prepared to bring all of its resources to bear to prevent such a resolution from being adopted against it. Obama’s intention to abandon Israel at the Security Council means that Israel comes to this battle severely hobbled.
But there is one advantage to the US’s betrayal.
Over the years, Israel’s ability to trust the US to veto anti-Israel resolutions at the Security Council was been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the US has secured Israel from diplomatic assaults. But on the other hand, our ability to trust Washington has made us diplomatically lazy and ineffective.
Safe in Washington’s shadow, we have behaved as through all diplomacy is public diplomacy. That is, we have pretended that statecraft begins and ends with making the moral or strategic case for our side against the other guys.
But public diplomacy is just one diplomatic tool.
The Syrian regime, for instance, has no moral case for securing international support. Bashar Assad didn’t convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to support him by arguing that he is better than alternative regimes. He bought Putin’s support by offering him permanent air and naval bases in Syria.
Then there is Morocco, another weak state with no public diplomacy case to make. Last March, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon outraged Rabat when he acknowledged the plain fact that Western Sahara, which Morocco occupies, is “occupied territory.”
Morocco quickly secured the support of Spain and France and launched an all-out onslaught against Ban. How did Morocco manage?
Morocco’s most powerful diplomatic resource is its control over migration flows from North Africa to Europe. Anytime it wishes, Rabat can open the migratory floodgates just as easily as it can keep them shut. And the French and Spanish know it.
In less than a month, Ban issued repeated abject apologies.
Game. Set. Match. Morocco.
From reports to date, it appears that shortly after the US elections on November 8, the Malaysians or Egyptians will submit a Palestinian-backed resolution that defines Israeli communities in united Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria as illegal. If the resolution is brought to a vote, the US will fail to veto it.
Such a resolution, or a resolution obligating Israel to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines, would cause Israel grave harm.
So what resources does Israel have to prevent this from happening?
Of course, we have public diplomacy. And that might work with some friendly nations. But it won’t get us over the top. We need to learn from the Syrian and Moroccan examples and consider what we have to offer Security Council members in exchange for their support in scuttling the approaching onslaught against us.
One such resource is the US Congress. Israel’s allies in Congress are sickened by the Obama administration’s devastating Middle East policies. A solid majority of lawmakers can be trusted to support actions that will reinforce Israel’s position.
Israel has other resources as well that we can trade on. We have natural gas. And we have technologies that the governments of the world require to surmount the challenges of the 21 century. There is no reason to give these resources away when we can trade them for diplomatic support.
As for the Palestinians, as the UNESCO vote showed, they are less popular now than at any time in the past 40 years. All they have to offer is threats and antisemitism. Both are powerful weapons.
But they are no longer invincible.
Israel’s goal must be to use our resources at the Security Council in a manner that will make it impossible for Obama to enable an anti-Israel resolution to pass.
A method for achieving this goal has two components. The first component is to convince a friendly country on the Security Council to propose a balanced resolution that would counter the Palestinian-backed Israel-bashing one.
Such a resolution could include four points. First, it could deplore efforts to deny Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.
Second, it can condemn the PA/PLO for their continued unlawful funding of terrorists.
Third, it can urge Israel to restrain settlement construction in areas that in previous negotiations have been identified as likely territory for a future Palestinian state.
Fourth, it can call on Israel and the PA to reinstate negotiations immediately without preconditions.
Israel has friendly ties with a few Security Council members, among them Uruguay and New Zealand. In the final weeks of the Obama era, it is possible that Israel will be able to convince one of them to submit a balanced resolution along these lines.
Obama would be hard-pressed to oppose such a resolution in favor of one that singles Israel out for rebuke.
But that still is insufficient. Obama can make Uruguay and New Zealand a better offer if he wishes.
And so we move to the second aspect of the plan.
If we learn nothing else from the Obama era, we must recognize that the time has come for Israel to stop sufficing with just one Security Council veto. Most states have several. And we need a few more.
Russia today is the best place to start our search for a second veto.
Putin is a dealmaker. As his agreement with Assad showed, he is willing to consider attractive offers. Obviously, Israel won’t offer Russia bases. But we do have other things to offer Putin in exchange for a veto.
For instance, in exchange for a Russian veto at the Security Council, Israel can offer Putin to lobby the US Congress to cancel US sanctions against Russia over Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Israel has no dog in that fight. And the sanctions are not getting the US anywhere.
Putin might go for the deal for two reasons. First, by stepping into the breach and defending Israel against Obama, he will humiliate Obama.
Second, if Israel succeeds with the Congress, he will reap economic rewards.
For his part, Putin wouldn’t even have to openly side with Israel. All he would have to do is announce that in the interests of regional stability, Russia will not support an unbalanced resolution on Israel and the Palestinians.
If Putin supports a balanced resolution, Obama will be checkmated. His plan to take revenge on Israel for not following him off the strategic cliff will be foiled. Israel will have survived his presidency.
None of this will be easy. And success is far from assured. There are many more ways for Israel to fail than succeed. Our diplomatic weakness remains a millstone around our neck. But as the UNESCO resolutions showed, attacking Israel is no longer cost free. We are not powerless in the grip of circumstances. We have cards to play.
And now is the time to play them for all they are worth.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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